Greenland Ice Loss Attributed to Warming Seas

The level of uncertainty in this game is pretty serious, but here we have at least a good indication that the visible losses are driven by warmer waters.  At least it conforms to what I am expecting regarding the influx of warmer waters into the Arctic generally.

That is my point of course.  Warmer sea water is eroding the glaciers and obviously is  doing the same for sea ice.  That warmer sea water dominates is the important lesson to be drawn by this evidence.

Again we can discard atmospheric heat as the principal driver.  It is simply not potent enough.

So while we have climatic warming of a sort at work, my contention on cause and effect is the complete reverse of what everyone has been accepting.  The climate is a bit player in driving the melt rates of ice caps and sea ice.  The warm water is been shifted northward at a historically stronger rate than previously true. 

Each year a larger than normal mass of warmer water is pushed into the Arctic.  Once the proverbial switch was thrown the extra mass arrived faithfully every year since.  Once you understand that, it is obvious that we will soon see off all the Arctic summer sea ice.  As I have posted since mid 2007, this will occur during 2012.

At least I no longer have to waste time trying to fit the weather into this erosion of the sea ice which I did the first two years.  If the sea ice was unable to add mass this year of all years then we are surely looking at the wrong horse.

Greenland ice loss driven by warming seas: study

by Staff Writers

Paris (AFP) Feb 14, 2010

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Greenland_ice_loss_driven_by_warming_seas_study_999.html

Greenland's continent-sized icesheet is being significantly eroded by winds and currents that drive warmer water into fjords, where it carves out the base of coastal glaciers, according to studies released Sunday.

The icy mass sitting atop Greenland holds enough water to boost global sea levels by seven metres (23 feet), potentially drowning low-lying coastal cities and deltas around the world.

At present, the ocean watermark is rising at around three millimetres (0.12 inches) per year, a figure that compares with 1.8mm (0.07 inches) annually in the early 1960s.

But Greenland's contribution has more than doubled in the past decade, and scientists suspect climate change is largely to blame, although exactly how this is occurring is fiercely debated.

Some theories point to air temperatures, which are rising faster in far northern latitudes than the global average.

A rival idea is that shifting currents and subtropical ocean waters moving north are eroding the foundation of coastal glaciers, accelerating their slide into the sea, especially those inside Greenland's many fjords.

Until now, however, these studies have been mainly based on mathematical models rather than observation.

A team of scientists led by Fiammetta Straneo of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts set out to help fill that data void.

Working off of a ship in July and September 2008, the researchers took detailed measurements of the water properties in the Sermilik Fjord connecting Helheim Glacier in eastern Greenland with the ocean.

They found deep water streaming into the fjord was 3.0-4.0 degrees Celsius (37.4-39.2 degrees Fahrenheit), warm enough to cut into the base of the glaciers and hasten their plunge into the sea.

Moored instruments left in the fjord for eight months showed that winds aligned with the coastline played a crucial role in the influx of these warmer waters.

"Our findings support increased submarine melting as a trigger for the glacier acceleration, but indicated a combination of atmospheric and oceanic changes as the likely driver," the researchers say.

In a separate field study, Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,California and colleagues tried to calculate the relative share of the causes of glacier loss.

Investigating the western side of Greenland, they took ocean measurements in August 2008 in three fjords at the base of four glaciers breaking off into the sea, a process known as calving.

Ocean melting, they found, accounted for between 20 and 75 percent of ice loss from the glacier face, with calving from the part of the iceberg exposed to air accounting for the rest.

Meanwhile, a study also published in the journal Nature Geoscience warned that oceans could become more acidic faster than at any time over the last 65 million years.

Andy Ridgwell and Daniella Schmidt of the University of Bristol, western England compared past and future changes in ocean acidity using computer simulations.

They found that the surface of the ocean is set to acidify even faster than it did during a well-documented episode of greenhouse warming 55.5 million years ago.

Accelerating acidification has already begun to take a toll on numerous marine animals that play a vital role in ocean food chain and help draw off huge quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere.

The calcium carapace of microscopic animals called foraminifera living in the Southern Ocean, for example, have fallen in weight by a third.

Flying Dragons

I caught this first item and was surprised I had never heard of it.  It is far too dramatic an animal to have gone unremarked.  A quick query revealed the additional item in Wikipedia.

We already knew about extinct flying lizards and this gives us an excellent example of another such animal.  It also spells out that the weakness of the pterodactyl and its kin was certainly that they were principally gliders.

In this case they are small and arboreal which is a great plan and good for somewhat larger versions.

I would like to see someone work out the mechanics for a larger version becoming airborne and gaining altitude. Perhaps these critters can teach us.

There have been reports of pterodactyls spotted in remote locales. Those reports may be simple hoaxes, except that I really have no reason to rule out the possibility on the basis of purported class extinction when I am seeing creditable evidence that parts of the class are still about, though scarce.

More creditably, wherever strange and dangerous animal came into conflict with humanity over hunting grounds, we solved it.  A hunting band with spears will see off many troublesome large animals, particularly if they like to sleep in the sun by themselves.

Thus whatever remnant populations exist of obscure critters, they will be in areas normally forever free of human activity

Y'Know the Flying Dragons in Avatar? Tiny Real-Life Version Discovered in Indonesia

by Michael Graham Richard, Ottawa, Canada   on 02.16.10

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/02/tiny-dragon-indonesia-like-avatar.php

http://www.treehugger.com/tiny-dragon-lizard-indonesia-photo1.jpg

Photo: Reddit user Biophilia_curiosus

Can't Wait Until They Find the Full-Sized Species...

A Reddit.com user by the name of Biophilia_curiosus posted a few photos that he took in Indonesia. They show an amazing species of gliding lizard which basically looks like a miniature dragon. Fans of the film Avatar will be reminded of the flying Toruks... More photos below.

http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/flying-tiny-dragon-lizard-avatar-photo001.jpg

Photo: Reddit user Biophilia_curiosus

Biophilia_curiosus wrote: "The crazy part is that those lines you see running through the wings like veins are actually its ribs! Evolution did a number on these guys. They can expand and contract their chests at will to glide great distances. We were only able to catch females as they were laying their eggs. All we could do is watch as the males soared overhead."

http://www.treehugger.com/tiny-dragon-lizard-indonesia-photo3.jpg

Photo: Reddit user Biophilia_curiosus

The photos were taken in Buton, Indonesia, in the Lambusango Forest reserve. As far as I can tell, nobody has identified the exact species of this lizard. Biology geeks who recognize this specimen, please let us know what it is in the comments below.

\ Draco (genus)

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Draco is a genus of gliding agamid lizard from Southeast Asia. The ribs and their connecting membrane can be extended to create a wing, the hindlimbs are flattened and wing-like in cross-section, and a small set of flaps on the neck serve as a horizontal stabilizer. Draco are arboreal insectivores. Glides as long as 60m have been recorded, over which the animal loses only 10m in height, which is quite some distance when you consider that one of these lizards is only around 20cm long. ^[1]

The only time a flying lizard ventures to the ground is when a female is ready to lay her eggs. She descends the tree she is on and makes a nest hole by forcing her head into the soil. She then lays 2-5 eggs before filling the hole. She guards the eggs for around 24 hours but then leaves and has nothing more to do with her offspring.^[1]

Linnaeus derived the name of this genus from the Latin term for mythological dragons.

Early Waterway links Atlantic and Pacific

That the Mayan developed an effective route between the Pacific and the Caribbean should not be surprising.  There were obviously goods needing such access and finding and improving such a route would be attractive to any organized polity nearby.

Besides, Central America is a mountain spine in which all bulk goods end up on the coast for transshipment anyway.  A linked riverine system would be well known and exploited early.

Whether any polity was organized enough to seriously improve it is an interesting question.  What goods would justify the effort?

I have always thought hydraulic engineering to be largely obvious, but never built unless driven by ample traffic and economic incentives.  The Isthmus of Corinth was an excellent example of this.  The value of a canal was always obvious, but traffic was always low enough to make portaging competitive for most of history.

In any event, this particular connection would obviously require a modest effort to provide easy movement.  A few ditches possibly and it becomes easy to traverse.  And if anything were to prove difficult, it seems a simple portage will suffice.

It is definitely a local proposition though.

Explorer finds evidence of early waterway from Atlantic to Pacific

Valentine Low

February 13, 2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7025756.ece

Hailed by some as the eighth wonder of the world, the Panama Canal is one of the greatest engineering achievements. It took more than 20 years and cost the lives of more than 27,000 workers. It was the culmination of a dream that began more than 400 years earlier to create a water passage between the Atlantic and Pacific.

But was it really the first? An explorer claims to have found evidence of another, more ancient, water route between the oceans — one that existed hundreds of years before the Panama Canal was conceived.

Several hundred miles to the north-west, in Nicaragua, the route — which involves rivers, a lake and flood plains — was discovered by Colonel John Blashford-Snell, who has just returned from an expedition there.

“It is tremendously exciting,” said the veteran explorer. “With effort it is navigable. But it is going to need more investigation.” He is now planning another expedition to discover whether it is really possible to take a boat from one coast to the other without touching land.

If so, it will prove something remarkable: that the ancient maps which show a passage between the two oceans — and which have long been dismissed as fanciful — had a greater claim to accuracy than was realised.

A 1774 map by Thomas Kitchin, for example, appears to show a channel that would allow boats to pass between the oceans.

Colonel Blashford-Snell’s expedition set out to find evidence that a canal once existed in Nicaragua, part of a wider — and more far-fetched — theory by the writer Gavin Menzies that the Chinese landed in America long before Columbus.

No records of such a canal exist, although there were plans for a Nicaragua canal before the argument for Panama won the day.

Whether Colonel Blashford-Snell found evidence of ancient canals is arguable — he does not push the point himself — but the case for a natural water passage is strong, according to the explorer.

Parts of the passage are well known, if not obviously navigable. Lake Nicaragua, which is 100ft (32m) above sea level, occupies the central part of the isthmus, and from there the San Juan River runs east to the Caribbean.

Rapids make the upper parts of the river hard to navigate, although in 1780 a young Horatio Nelson ventured upstream to lead an assault on a Spanish fort on the river.

“It is said that the pirate Henry Morgan came up from the Caribbean three times in 12m boats,” said Colonel Blashford-Snell. “When he got to the rapids, he got round them by pulling the boats.

“Then they rowed across the lake, sacked the city of Granada and then retired back to the Caribbean with their loot.”

Getting from the lake to the Pacific seemed to be a greater challenge, even though it is a distance of only 12 miles (19km) at its shortest.

Colonel Blashford-Snell, who spent two weeks in Nicaragua last month with a team of four, said he found places where the head waters of different river systems — one flowing east into the lake, another flowing west into the Pacific — were only a few hundred yards apart. The seemingly unanswerable question, however, was how to get from one river to the other.

Then, by chance, he met a local fisherman who helped him to unlock the puzzle. Mariano Hernandez told them he had made the journey from the centre of the isthmus between Lake Nicaragua and the Pacific down to the lake to go fishing — a journey made possible during the rainy season when the land turns into a lake up to 2m deep.

“He said he built a 3m canoe out of cedar wood and did the journey with his brother. They had one nasty capsize and also had a very nasty shock when a bull shark appeared alongside. But they did the journey three times,” said Colonel Blashford-Snell. The fisherman also said he had made the journey west to the Pacific on another river. According to the explorer, other villagers corroborated the fisherman’s story.

“It seems likely that even if early cartographers did not see this lake, they were told about it by the indigenous people, and thus drew a channel on their maps,” said Colonel Blashford-Snell. “I’m sure this is how the story of the legendary route between the oceans started.”

A Winter of Highland Snows

We have entered the worst of times for wildlife.  In both Europe and North America they are been reintroduced to the rigors of a deadly winter.  The losses will be heavy.

Otherwise this is a nice bit of writing that captures the essence of this winter.  Enjoy a bitter sweet piece and look at the snowy woods around us and perhaps for the first time in years it is time again to read Robert Frost.

The wildlife is struggling this year though I am sure they will not be hunted out by wolves.

Animals dig in for the big freeze

The harsh winter is playing havoc with Britain’s wildlife, says John Lister-Kaye.

By John Lister-Kaye

Published: 12:01AM GMT 14 Feb 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/7231272/Animals-dig-in-for-the-big-freeze.html

It is winter in the Highlands. In the marsh and the trackside ditch, in the loch’s peaty mires, in the pinewood, the pulses of life have slowed and stilled. The nature of the Highlands has shut up shop; the signs have all come down. It is winter. The bugs and weevils are hiding now, the worms, the millipedes, the caterpillars and leatherjackets, the frog and the toad, adder, slow worm, wood mouse and vole, the squirrel, the hedgehog and the fat snoring badger are settled in for the long, dark cold.

This has been a Scandinavian winter and it isn’t over yet. The last week has been below zero at night, struggling to 3 or 4C by day under a weak sun. Here in the Highlands of Scotland we may be better prepared for snow and ice than further south, but we have become complacent of late. Some years there has just been a dusting of powdery snow, sometimes none at all and the thermometer has barely dipped below zero.

For some of our wildlife, this has been misleading. In warm winters hedgehogs have emerged from hibernation far too early, only to find there is nothing to eat or that the ground freezes again. While they can duck back into hibernation, it is risky and can consume too much energy too quickly so that they don’t make it through to spring. But not this year. They’re still tucked up in their leafy and mossy dens.

I found one quite by accident a few weeks ago. I perched on a stump almost completely rotted, a deep moss-filled crater and a rim of wood just wide enough to support my backside. I peered into its dark, fungally interior – something wasn’t right. It had been recently disturbed. I pried further, carefully lifting a thick green hassock of moss. Underneath was a bed of soft, dry, fibrous and needly litter with the sort of heady, mother-earth scent you’d expect from someone practising aromatherapy in a potting shed. I pushed my fingers into it and came to fresh, dry oak leaves. How could fresh leaves get underneath moss? Now I knew someone was at home. A finger teased gently into the leaves withdrew smartly – it was very prickly.

I couldn’t resist taking a peek, so I half uncovered the fat, large hedgehog curled as tight as a clenched fist. She didn’t stir, although I fancy I detected a slight firming of the furry aperture where her head and legs were tucked together, but whether this was a reflex tension that performed regardless of her torpor or whether she was not yet fully in hibernation, I couldn’t say. Frosts were then nightly events, so she may have been in there for some time; although the fresh leaves she took in with her impaled on her spines as a winter wrapping seemed to suggest that it can only have been after the November leaf fall. What I found so intriguing was how she had managed to close off her entrance, somehow blocking the tunnel with leaves and pulling the moss door closed behind her.

I covered her up again, tucking her nest in around her and doing a slightly better concealment job than she had done for herself. I gathered some extra moss from another stump and laid it carefully over the top. Foxes and badgers will unroll a hibernating hedgehog and leave only its spiny skin as the evidence of their efficiency. We have plenty of both foraging through our winter woods, and while I don’t believe in interfering with nature – a complicated ethic I have often struggled with – I certainly didn’t want to be the cause of her demise. I finished off with a couple of dead spruce branches across the top for good measure.

So she is well out of the way, below the cold, then below snowdrift, breathing barely detectable and only a flicker of a heartbeat, down from 190 per minute to 20 or less. Hedgehogs’ body temperatures fall from 35C to 10C, only the area around the heart retaining its normal temperature. Metabolism falls by 75 per cent, which is vital so that it can eke out the consumption of its precious fat reserves. Hopefully this year she will stay where she is until April.

Our winter hit in a big way back in mid-December. Suddenly we had 56cm (22in) of heavy wet snow immediately followed by a freeze. Not a fridge freeze, this was a deep freeze – actually, colder than your deep freeze. At its moonlit nadir it crashed to -18C. That’s -0.4F in old money, what we used to call 33 degrees of frost. And it lasted for four weeks, cold sufficient to turn snowdrifts into rigid ramps and pyramids of impenetrable ice, to freeze the loch to 27cm (11in).

Power lines and trees burdened with frozen snow came down, pipes froze and avalanches of ice cascaded down roofs, bringing with them slates and guttering by the yard. Farm buildings crashed to the ground. But that is nothing compared with what happened to the poor old woodcock. This most elegant of all woodland waders survives by probing the leaf litter with its bill for insects, worms and bugs. It couldn’t. For weeks they found nothing to eat at all.

My friend Peter Tilbrook picked up three dead woodcock in his garden at Cromarty and I found one in our woods so weak that I could pick it up. Wrens have been clobbered, too. Very sensibly they congregate in huddles to keep themselves warm. But many wrens, tits and tree creepers will not have survived the cold; it isn’t just that they can’t maintain body heat, even if they could there are no insects to eat.

On the foreshore waders have had a hard time as the sea edge and the mudflats froze like concrete. I found dead oystercatchers, and where I usually see turnstones they were absent – sensibly headed south for unfrozen stones to turn. Our grey geese, normally overwintering here on the Moray Firth in tens of thousands on the fertile stubble and potato fields, cleared off to England or the Low Countries.

Last night I went to see if our badgers were out and about, and they were. I was pleased to see two animals in good condition, perhaps helped by the peanuts we put out for them. And I saw one pipistrelle bat chasing a moth, but then the pips are remarkable. They have a much more mobile hibernation than the hedgehog. They can switch their heterothermic torpor on and off, so if it warms up in mid-winter and a few moths emerge, they can pop out for a night bite.

Many of the flying insects are dead, like the corpses of dragonflies gripped to the stems of rushes in a last embrace. Their work is done; their future lies in the eggs now secure among water-lily leaves frost-browned and rotting beneath the ice. The long-eared bats vanished from the roof long ago, migrated south in pursuit of warmth and insects; dozens of twitching bundles of fur and membranous ears jammed into the apex under the slates, there one minute, gone the next.

All but the toughest birds have headed south; the golden plovers are long gone from the hills, their plaintive calls faded away, down to the estuaries and the mud flats where they gathered in flocks before pressing on south. The high hills are empty but for the golden eagle and the snow-white ptarmigan; above the loch the buzzards scream back at the croaking jeers of ravens and hoodie crows, the only sounds, the only movement to be seen.

Our eagles will do well this winter. Red deer are starving right across the hills; an abundance of carrion dots the snowfields and hill sheep will have succumbed too if shepherds couldn’t get hay to them in the deep snow. So the eagles will come through well and we may even see an increase in chick production this spring. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

·                'At the Water’s Edge: A Personal Quest for Wilderness’ by John Lister-Kaye (Canongate Books), is available from Telegraph Books for £15.99 plus £1.25 p&p. Call 0844 871 1516 or visit www.books.telegraph.co.uk

Archeology Begins on Atlantis Site

Read my post regarding Rainer Kuhne (2 June 2008) on this site and you will quickly concur that this site and its time and circumstance is exactly mirrored by Plato.

I am pleased to see that the article has inspired an on the ground investigation and that Atlantis is at least been mentioned in passing.  Since my interpretations of the Atlantic Bronze Age are way ahead of the curve, it is enough to see that boots are finally on the ground.  I know it will be too much to discover the Atlantean treasury of bronze ingots.  A tsunami would have destroyed the town and its peoples and obviously its imperium, but left the metal available for quick looting.

The local society continued on but no longer as the center of a commercial empire.  The Sea Peoples lost their access to copper ingots from the Americas and with it the currency underpinning their civilization.  Their tributary palace-centered colonies or trade factories then fell.  This included the Mycenaeans and the Philistines to put a face on the collapse.

The Trojans and others were at the periphery of this mercantile empire in the Baltic lands as clearly explained by da Vinci last year.  Their war occurred in the generation before the collapse which was triggered by Hekla in 1159 BCE.  That event forced the northern folk to head south and it is plausible that these remnants resettled in Italy to found Rome if we want to believe clearly self serving legend.

We are able to paint a creditable picture of the decades around 1159 BCE and the various peoples we presently know about.  The metal culture was controlled by an aristocracy who built centers to act as their trading posts.  Their surrounding cultures could have been anything and has left scant evidence behind.

Recall the Hudson Bay factories and their relationship to indigenous natives.  The Archeological record would show only traces of their forts and nothing else.   The linkage to London if discerned would have been an enigma.

Lost city of Atlantis 'could be buried in southern Spain'

Archaeologists have begun the search for an ancient civilization in southern Spain that some believe could help pinpoint the legendary lost city of Atlantis.

By Fiona Govan in Madrid 

Published: 6:00AM GMT 19 Jan 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/7019522/Lost-city-of-Atlantis-could-be-buried-in-southern-Spain.html

A team of researchers from Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Study (CSIC) are examining a marshy area of Andalusian parkland to find evidence of a 3,000-year-old settlement.

They believe that Tartessos, a wealthy civilization in southern Iberia that predates the Phoenicians, may have had its capital in the heart of what is now the Donana national park.

Until now historians had dismissed the region as a possible site believing that it had been submerged since the ice age. But it is claimed new evidence suggests the waters may have receded in time for the Tartessians to build an urban centre, which was later destroyed in a tsunami.

The Hinojos marshes, an area close to the mouth of the Guadalquiver river where it meets the Atlantic, have now been pinpointed as the site most likely to provide evidence of a lost city.

Archaeological findings have already proved the existence of Tartessian culture at sites on the opposite bank of the river.

"If they existed on the other side, they must also have been here (in Donana)," Sebastian Celestino, the archaeologist leading the project told the newspaper El Pais.

"There were earthquakes and one of them caused a tsunami that razed everything and which coincided with the era in which Tartessian power was at its height."

Aerial photos show the existence of large circular and rectangular forms that could not have been produced by nature.

The images, together with literary accounts by ancient Greek geographers have given weight to the theory that a great Tartessian city once existed within the park.

The Tartessian civilization, which developed in southern Spain between the 11th and 7th centuries BC and became rich trading gold and silver from local mines, has long been linked by mythologists to the Atlantis legend.

While the Spanish researchers refuse to speculate on whether they are on the brink of discovering Atlantis others believe their research could be a breakthrough in a centuries old quest.

"Evidence is mounting that suggests the story of Atlantis was not mere fiction, fable or myth, but a true story as Plato always maintained," said Georgeos Diaz-Montexano, a Cuban archeologist who has spent the last 15 years searching for the submerged city.

"Atlantis is not exactly where the CSIC is looking, but it is close," he claimed.

The theory is just the latest in a long list of suggested locations for Atlantis, including various Mediterranean islands, the Azores, the Sahara desert, Central America and Antarctica.

Secret of Aging

The real news appears to be that the role of telomeres has been overstated.  Cellular aging appears be a response to ongoing DNA damage or other damage and not particularly programmed.

My own conjecture is that our high metabolic rate out runs our ability to produce enough stem cells to replace cell losses on a timely basis.  This a mechanical explanation that largely fits the apparent facts.

I have observed a small but bad scar on my knuckle, caused when I was a teenager slowly transition back to mostly normal skin tissue.  Any inherent weakness has dissipated over the decades.  Yet this strongly suggests that the only restraint from rapid rejuvenation is merely mechanical capacity.

That suggests that stem cell augmentation can hugely restore a large part of the aging body.  It is little wonder that such optimism exists around the subject of stem cells.

As an aside, healing is sharply enhanced by taking doses of condriten sulphate.  This was shown to reverse heart attack damage to the point of eliminating EKG evidence long after the event.  This obviously applies to any and all internal damage needing to heal up properly.

At least we clearly know the pathway that induces well known aging effects.

Scientists discover the secret of ageing

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/436a39a0-1a6e-11df-a2e3-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

By Clive Cookson in London

Published: February 15 2010 23:00 | Last updated: February 15 2010 23:00

One of the biggest puzzles in biology – how and why living cells age – has been solved by an international team based at Newcastle University, in north-east England.

The answer is complex, and will not produce an elixir of eternal life in the foreseeable future.

But the scientists expect better drugs for age-related illnesses, such as diabetes and heart disease, to emerge from their discovery of the biochemical pathway involved in ageing.

The Newcastle team, working with the University of Ulm in Germany, used a comprehensive “systems biology” approach, involving computer modeling and experiments with cell cultures and genetically modified mice, to investigate why cells become senescent. In this aged state, cells stop dividing and the tissues they make up show physical signs of deterioration, from wrinkling skin to a failing heart.

The research, published by the journal Molecular Systems Biology, shows that when an ageing cell detects serious damage to its DNA – caused by the wear and tear of life – it sends out specific internal signals.

These distress signals trigger the cell’s mitochondria, its tiny energy-producing power packs, to make oxidising “free radical” molecules, which in turn tell the cell either to destroy itself or to stop dividing. The aim is to avoid the damaged DNA that causes cancer.

The Newcastle discovery plays down the role of telomeres, the protective tips on the ends of human chromosomes, which gradually become shorter as we grow older.

“There has been a huge amount of speculation about how blocking telomere erosion might cure ageing and age-related diseases,” said Tom Kirkwood, director of Newcastle’s Institute of Ageing and Health. “The telomere story has over-promised and the biology is more complicated.”

He added: “Our breakthrough means that we stand a very much better chance of making a successful attack on age-related diseases while at the same time avoiding the risk of unwanted side-effects like cancer.”

His colleague Thomas von Zglinicki emphasized caution in the research’s next stage – to investigate ways to prevent cellular senescence.

“It is absolutely essential to tread carefully in trying to alter processes that cause cells to age, because the last thing we want is to help age-damaged cells from breaking out to become malignant,” said Mr von Zglinicki.

Pat Chaote in 'Saving Capitalism'

Pat Chaote has published a book titled ‘Saving Capitalism’.  I heartily recommend it as mandatory reading for all Americans.

This is a short history of what has gone wrong over the past decade and also why.  I have already posted that the cause of the financial disaster was outright treason.  This is the first economist to come out and spell out the details.  He adds to my own observations and for exactly the same reasons. 

He also rings the bell on the advent of state sponsored capitalism.  This is not going to go away and must be vigorously regulated.  This is an area that I admit I was aware of but had been happy to largely ignore.  That is not a good idea.  We do not have to wait here for human stupidity to arise before we act.

He outlines several excellent recommendations to remedy the situation that need to be implemented.  It is likely that this will not happen during Obama’s tenure.

He rightly describes the present situation as a depression with a small capital. 

If you want to understand what is presently taking place in the USA, then get this book.

As he clearly points out, the collapse has mirrored the collapse of the Great Depression.  We are now entering the second phase of the collapse cycle, were good business is strangled for cash and a second wave of massive layoffs is in store.  People with good jobs and partially paid for homes will suddenly find themselves forced into liquidation.

That is the present risk that must be averted.  It is now that you want to be scared.  Saving Wall Street cannot save Main Street if the banking industry is unable to lend.

California is on the verge of collapse and must internalize its banking arrangements as soon as possible in the same way as was done by Montana and Alberta during the Depression.  It is the only way in which the political forces in the state can be brought to heel.

Europe is struggling to contain Greece and may not succeed.  In that case, expect the currency arrangements to become at least partially unstuck until it gets sorted out.

Janosh's New Images

Three new images from a favorite artist based in the Netherlands.  Enjoy!